Pages

Jane you ignorant slut!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Probably the last "good season" of Saturday Night Live occurred when I was in Junior High...After that season everyone quit, except Brian Doyle-Murray...and he is too grouchy.

I mean, is it SNL without Lorne Michaels at the helm?

Anydebatetopic, we had a teacher named Mr. Finnegan and he was the wildest English teacher on the planet. He read Tom Sawyer aloud to us in class and put his heart and soul into making the characters come alive for a bunch of white, middle-class, midwest, t(w)eens. No easy feat.

Saturday Night Live, or SNL, had a hold on the public lexicon - it still does. (Really? Really?) And one young girl in Mr. Finnegan's English class had picked up on a word she found HI-LAR-I-OUS!
(close your eyes if you are sensitve!)

DILDO

She used it CONSTANTLY. And one day she said it in class, something like,

"Jeez John, don't be such a dildo!"

However, she had no earthly idea what the word meant. Mr. Finnegan decided this girl needed a lesson in how to UNDERSTAND the words that are coming out of your mouth...

"Miss "K", do you KNOW what a dildo IS???"
"ummmmm"
"Well, Miss K, a dildo is a device used to simulate sexual intercourse. In other terms a vibrator."

plunk - the sound of EVERY girl in the classes jaw dropping onto their desk!

"Miss K, do you think you would like to CONTINUE using that word in reference to your classmates?"

snort, snicker snicker - all the boys have now recovered the shock...

"ummmm"
"I did not think so, sit down."

Yes, ladies and gentleman, an exchange that would not get past any jr. high audience today - Finney would have been FIRED. This is as recalled by the many retellings of the story that day - how I WISH I were in that English class, but I BELIEVE it...you would too if you knew Finnegan.

(plus, we knew that Miss K used the word all the time, we ALL did. and now we knew what it MEANT!)

Here is a clip from SNL around that time. What do kids know about s.e.x.? Nada.